(Re the opening credits: Renee nailed it a few bars in and said, ever so casually, "That's Karen O, singing." Brill.)
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| Rooney Mara, near the only thing I liked about this movie. |
So, that accounts for a little over twenty minutes of a one-hundred and fifty-eight minute long motion picture. That does not make for a very pretty Slugging Percentage.
I understand that this is a very dark, bleak, Swedish story about disgusting and inhumane men who do disgusting and inhumane things to women but could Fincher use a different palette for once? These sickly, nauseating yellows and greens he keeps using over and over in every one of his films are near to becoming a joke, or self-parody. Are there not other colors in the spectrum that could tell this story?
And does any audience need to suffer through yet another, "I have trapped you just when you thought you had me. Yes, I killed them all. And now I am going to talk to you all about it for the next five minutes or so. Hopefully, your partner will not get here in time to save you, yes?" You know, if it is something like BBC Sherlock, or Hot Fuzz, or the OSS movies, or the crappy James Bond franchise, or anything even showing the barest modicum of irony or sense of humor then I can buy it. But not with this film.
(There are far too many reasons to recount here why Kind and Hearts and Coronets is a stunning masterpiece, the finest film Ealing produced, but one of them is director and screenwriter, Robert Hamer's take on this type of scene: Dennis Price has trapped the last member of the D'Ascoyne family -- all members of the D'Ascoyne family are played by Sir Alec Guinness -- that he needs to execute in order to become the Duke of Chalfont. Price tells Sir Alec that he has murdered them all and that he is going to murder him, too. Price tells Sir Alec he did it because of the shameful way they excommunicated Price's mother from the D'Ascoyne family after she married for love instead of status. Then Price aims his rifle and shoots Sir Alec dead. Price runs away. End of scene.)
I thought Rooney Mara's performance was terrific. I loved every little detail of the way she inhabited Lisbeth. My fave detail was the way she held her cigarettes. But, I also liked her make-over scene because it reminded me of the film, Battle of Algiers and the scene where the Muslim Algerian women put on Western make-up and clothes in order to "blend" and set off a terrorist bomb.
Daniel Craig did not do much of anything for me, nor did the guy who played Martin, and Christopher Plummer was essentially wasted here. (Plummer did get some good lines, one of which is, "Isn't it interesting how fascists always steal the word, freedom?")
Overall, it was a really big disappointment for me and Renee feels the same. She might like it a little more than I do. Or maybe I am just a big baby and should stick to Miss Marple and Detective Montalbano. Those months of darkness really do take a toll on Sweden, hunh?
All my love,
Ardent
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| Yeah, this is probably more my speed, hunh? |
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